The Spectator - Solo Exhibition @ The Print House Gallery, Dalston, London

A Solo exhibition By Donald Shek showcasing original prints and drawings that explore the postmodern condition.

Someone Elses’s Party

8 Colour Original Silkscreen Print

300gsm Fabriano 5 (HP) (50cm x 70cm)

2 Cut Edges, 2 Deckled Edges.

Signed, Stamped and Numbered

Edition of 50

Winter 2017

The Day After Good Friday

9 Colour Original Silkscreen Print

300gsm Fabriano 5 (HP) (50cm x 70cm)

2 Cut Edges, 2 Deckled Edges.

Signed, Stamped and Numbered

Edition of 50

Winter 2017

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded to representation”

The Society of the Spectacle - Guy Debord

The piece, ‘Your Time is Up’ was referencing to Hackney Wick as being the home of dry cleaning. A nod to the past industry dominated by chinese migrants till home based washing machines became the norm. This work explored that narrative using digital fabric to envelope the urban landscape as a metaphor to the idea of impermanence. The spaces we live and work is temporal, constantly shifting both physically and socially.

These representations of London are markers that could unconsciously evoke an element of nostalgia to the viewer. They may also be signifiers of a cultural identity. The identity which the consumer society, the society of the media or the spectacle eagerly grasp onto since the postmodern condition has robbed us of anything tangibly real or authentic.

Postmodernism is a reaction to Modernism. Where Modernism was based on idealism and reason, Postmodernism was born of scepticism and suspicion of reason. To question the grand narratives and to deconstruct the structuralist forms. The problem with Postmodernism was a the constant recycling of the past, it became self referential and nothing would seem authentic. The lack of an authentic time or historical period, this timelessness of Postmodern time is called schizophrenia, as Jameson explained that,

..schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence. The schizophrenic thus does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ over time. On the other hand, the schizophrenic will clearly have a far more intense experience of any given present of the world we do, since our present is always part of some larger set of projects which force us selectively to focus our perceptions.

Your Time is Up

10 Colour Original Silkscreen Print

300gsm Fabriano 5 (HP) (50cm x 70cm)

2 Cut Edges, 2 Deckled Edges.

Signed, Stamped and Numbered

Edition of 50

Winter 2017

The works that form this exhibition thus play with the idea of the authentic by creating spaces from scratch using 3D technology. I attempt to play with ideas that have references but no clear distinction unless the viewer reads the text. The text is purely for the viewer to understand where the thought process came from if he/she so chooses to know. It doesn’t mean there is one way of reading an image it is an element of choice for one to understand. The choice to read what lies underneath the surface to tease out the ideas which have created these hybrid landscapes.

The search for something unique, to continuously develop my practice lead to the question of what can be new or even authentic in this postmodern age. The era of visual art laced with amphetamine and coated with truffle sprinkles so that it can be easily consumed with a square image, 860kb and #’ed till the cows come home. As Walter Benjamin reviews the development of the means of the mechanical reproduction of art, he discusses the concept of ‘authenticity’, of being in accordance with fact, noting that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking one element: its presence in time and space, it’s unique existence at the place where it happens to be. The action of mechanical reproduction diminishes the original artwork by changing the cultural context (original vs. copy); thus, the aura, the unique aesthetic authority, of an artwork is absent from the mechanically produced copy.”

China Town with a bit of Soy Sauce - Part 2

Graphite on 2 pages

300gsm Fabriano 5 (2x50cm x70cm)

2 Cut Edges , 2 Deckled Edges

Signed

Oct 2016.

The Permanent Opium War

Augmented Reality

Work in Progress

May 2018

The spectacle is a permanent opium war, waged to make it impossible to distinguish goods from commodities, or true satisfaction from survival that increases according to its own logic. Consumable survival must increase, in fact, because it continues to enshrine deprivation. The reason there is nothing beyond augmented survival, and no end to its growth, is that survival itself belongs to the realm of dispossession, it may guild poverty, but it cannot transcend it.

Society of the Spectacle - Guy Debord

The augmented reality model was viewed through the ipad available at the exhibition. Two additional markers were applied to the gallery facade and the exhibition flyer. This is work in progress developing a strand of work that explores the augmented reality world and the ideas that juxtapose the unreal with reality. In due course an Ios App, named DonshiSpectactor, developed using Unity and Vuforia will be available soon to download from the app store that will build over time to create situations in the real world.